My weekend movie: Easy Living (1937)

In Park Avenue it’s raining furs…

As Holly Golightly would say “There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl’s complexion”, but nothing suggests that this should be a golden rule. Take for instance Mary Smith (it ain’t a fantasy name): first a very, very expensive fur coat literally rain down on her head, then when she tries give it back she knows the rich millionaire who threw it away and he offers her also a very stylish hat (just to match the fur), then someone mistakes her for his mistress, some other spread the word and bang!… that’s the beginning of her fortune!

Easy Living (Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

Obviously this is not a true story. This is the plot of Easy Living the 1937 screwball comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen, written by Preston Sturges and starring Jean Arthur, one of the queens of comedy who plays Mary Smith, Edward Arnold, as the stout rich millionaire J.B. Ball, and Ray Milland, as his son John Jr.

Easy Living is the typical 1930’s comedy poking fun at the rich living in Park Avenue, who are non only privileged but also a bit nuts in a sort of compensation paid to all those people in the audience who, in 1937, were still coping with the aftermath of the Great Depression.

The story starts in the big J.B. Ball’s mansion where the millionaire, who’s the third banker in New York, is having an argument with is son who, suddenly determined to make it on his own, announces he’s leaving home. The next fight is against his wife, a desperate housewife with servants, who consoles herself with shopping sprees. This time she had bought a 58000$ fur coat and the third banker in New York (who’s a bit stingy, like all those who really have money) doesn’t approve. So he burst into the little apartment she uses as a wardrobe trying to find it and return it. His wife grabs the fur and flee on the penthouse roof but he found her and in a few moments the fur is flying over Park Avenue to land on Mary Smith’s head. The rest of the story is know, but what’ s really strange in Easy Living is the fact that the more the story goes on, the more you have the impression that censorship should have missed something…

Jean Arthur in 1940 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As expected in a movie made after the 1934 enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code, and probably as it happened in the original story written by the American author Vera Caspary on which the movie is based, the fur coat causes some troubles to Mary at the beginning. In fact, she lose her job at the Boy’s Constant Companion (a boy’s magazine where apparently only work ageing women, except for Mary and the male editor): a coat made with dead animal’s bodies is too expensive for a single woman who’s not an heiress, therefore it’s the evidence of her immoral behaviour (she must be a rich man’s mistress).

What seems to suggest a censor’s inattention are the events that from now on follow one another (while Sturges leaves nothing but the title of Caspary’s “little story of deceit and illusions”). It’s the fact that almost everyone thinks she is some sort of a lost girl that allows Mary to turn her life into a five-star one. Thinking she is J.B. Ball’s mistress Mr Louis Louis (Luis Alberni), the owner of a luxury Hotel who owes money to the banker, offers Mary a sumptuous accommodation, and for the same reason other people offer her expensive clothes, jewels and even cars… and in the end, instead of paying her good fortune giving up love and any hope for romance (a typical punishment for independent girls) she finds a fiancé (Ball’s son, though she doesn’t know it) but not before almost provoking a new Wall Street crash offering to her beloved one the opportunity to show his businessman’s qualities saving his father’s bank.

Maybe it’s because Mary doesn’t realize what’s happening (the fact that almost everybody thinks she’s having an affair with J.B. Ball), maybe it’s because Mitchell Leisen was so good in satisfying the most absurd Production Code’s requirements (in a love scene with Mary and John jr. both lying on a long couch, they had to be in opposite directions so that their heads could meet in the middle and there could be no physical contact outside of a kiss), but the happy ending arrives and Mary is not obliged to learn a moral lesson or to shed a tear.

And that’s a good reason to watch once again Easy Living, especially if you like screwball comedies full of witty lines ans a bit of nonsense.

In the end, ther’s something for music lovers. Easy Living, the song by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin, a jazz standard recorded by many performers, has been written for that movie (you can hear it in the title sequence)